


remake me (break me down)

by deliciously_devient



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Brainwashing, M/M, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:02:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27126241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliciously_devient/pseuds/deliciously_devient
Summary: Jesse McCree has been through a lot in his short life. He’s got a lot left to go through, yet.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Hanzo Shimada
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	remake me (break me down)

**Author's Note:**

> TW for torture, mild body horror and lots of angst. There is a lot of trauma being dumped on our favorite cowboy this time around, so if that’s not your thing then maybe find somewhere else to hang your hat.

Pain isn’t anything new to McCree; it’s an old friend, something he seeks out on occasion, it’s warm, throbbing embrace something of a constant companion. 

The pain he feels at this particular moment is centered in his head, shoulders and arms. He’s been awake for a moment or longer -time doesn’t mean much when you’re tied to a chair, really- but he hasn’t moved since he became aware. His arms are behind his back; the back of the chair is metal, unforgiving, digging into his shoulder blades, his arms tied tightly together at the elbow, making him arch oddly even as he’s slumped.

He’s gonna have to shift soon. Too long in this position and he might damage something permanently, but he doesn’t want to give away his hand so soon, not when he knows nothing about his captors. Slowly, he attempts to move the fingers in his left hand; they don’t respond and he sighs internally.

He’s here because he got sloppy. So consumed with excitement at seeing Hanzo’s face when he presented him with a bottle of his favorite brand of sake, he hadn’t paid attention as he walked through the streets of Gibraltar. Six years on the run, over a decade of covert ops training, and he let himself get nabbed in the city because he couldn’t think of anything but the thought of Hanzo’s smile.

_ Idiot,  _ he thinks viciously.  _ You never change, always chasing after what you don’t deserve, costin’ everyone time. Look at where you got yourself into. _

He hears a door open, heavy footsteps entering. There’s a slight echo, which likely means concrete walls, which means he’s probably in a cell of some sort. The footsteps stop in front of him, a few feet away, just out of range of his legs. He doesn’t react, keeping his breathing slow and regulated, as if he’s still unconscious.

“You can stop pretending, McCree. I know you are awake,” a deep, smooth voice says, and McCree almost snorts. It figures he was picked up by Talon.

At least it was him, and not someone important.

He doesn’t immediately react, instead stretching as much as he can, making a big show of yawning. He snaps his head to the side, cracking his neck with a loud pop, before slowly opening his eyes, greeting Doomfist with a slow, lazy smile.

“Weeeell,” he says, low and slow, as if he hasn’t got a care in the world. “Fancy meetin’ you here, Akande,” he drawls, kicking his legs out and crossing them over one another, as if he were perfectly comfortable. The position puts incredible strain on his back and shoulders, and the already abused muscles are screaming at him. He pushes the pain to the back of his mind, ignoring it in favor of staring Akande in the eye.

The terrorist seems inordinately pleased with himself, standing tall with his arms crossed. He’s dressed in a sharp suit, his modded arm missing its gauntlet; he feels confident, then. As he should, McCree thinks to himself; with a dead arm and no gun, McCree is kinda useless.

He’s a good eye and a gun, but not much else.

“McCree,” Akande greets with a tilt of his head. “I had hoped to bring you here as an ally, but having you as a captive will run in my favor just as well.”

“I ain’t telling you shit, Akande, and if you really got Gabe under your boot, he’ll tell you well enough that I don’t crack,” McCree says bluntly, getting straight to the point.

“I don’t imagine there’s much information you have that will benefit us,” Akande says, just as blunt. “We know most of the agents recalled; we know where your base is, and we know just as well that it is too well-defended to breach easily.”

Akande pauses, and here his smirk widens into a grin; it’s the expression of someone who thinks they have an advantage.

“But, I’m sure they’ll be just  _ dying  _ to retrieve their dear friend McCree,” he says, in that lilting way that all villains seem to have when they’ve said something meant to inspire fear.

McCree isn’t a stupid man; he woulda been dead fifteen times over if he was. He can put two and two together just as well as the next guy, knows very well that Akande means to use him as bait to lead the newly recalled Overwatch into a trap to kill or capture them. While McCree himself knows he won’t crack under pressure, he also knows that the others might. He imagines Lena with blue skin and empty eyes, Genji in black armor and blood on his blade. Their minds are so fragile.

He laughs.

“ _ Really _ ?” he snorts, giggling as Akande’s expression sours at the sound of his near-mad laughter. “That’s yer angle? Use me as bait?”

“Your organization is easy to bait,” Akande snaps. “You are all reckless; when we captured Miss Song in the aftermath of a battle, you yourself risked going into Widowmaker’s line of sight to board the extraction ship to rescue her.”

“Yeah,” McCree says, laughter calming, but his grin doesn’t fade. “But that was Hana. They all  _ love _ her. She’s an integral part of the team.”

Akande’s eyes narrow, and he stares at McCree, confusion apparent. “What are you implying?”

McCree shrugs as well as he can with his arms bound. “Ain’t implyin’ nothin’. I’m tellin’ ya a fact,” he says slowly. “Iffn you was set on baiting Overwatch into a rescue mission, you picked the worst candidate. Ain’t a one of them that’ll come for me. Shit, they won’t even realize I’m gone.”

Akande stares McCree down, his eyes narrowed and expression calculating before he speaks again. “You....believe this.”

“Akande,” McCree says slowly, patiently. “I ain’t nothin’ but a dumb gun pointed in the right direction on occasion. They don’t like me, an’ they certainly ain’t gonna risk the manpower or the resources on a rescue mission for  _ me.  _ Ya might as well cut your losses and kill me now, cuz I ain’t of no other value.”

Akande snorts, and Jesse knows that he’s chosen not to believe him. It’s clear in his eyes that he intends to do as he said, and attempt to use Jesse as bait. He sighs, wiggles slightly as he recrosses his legs. 

“I’m sure Gabe’s told you what Blackwatch was to the rest of Overwatch,” Jesse says softly. “Let’s say the attitude carried over. 76 don’t trust me a lick, and if you tell ‘em you got me he’s gonna convince them I’m a turncoat. Now, you go on and do what you’re gonna do, I wouldn’t believe the guy in the chair none neither. But there’s only one way this ends, and it’s with a bullet.”

Akande stares hard at Jesse for a long while, before turning heel and leaving. Jesse readjusts himself, trying to alleviate the strain on his shoulders but ultimately gives up and accepts he’s just gonna be in pain. He looks around the room but there’s nothing except the chair he’s in, and a metal grate in the center of the concrete and a mat in the corner. The door is neumatic, and a camera is set in one corner blinking red. 

Down his arm and his gear, he knows he’s near-useless. He’s likely being held at a Talon base deep underground so even if he got out of this room it’s likely he’d be caught in minutes. He knows there’s no rescue coming, knows that the only people on base that might notice he’s gone are Hanzo and Genji, and even then he knows Genji has never really trusted him and Hanzo hasn’t known him long enough. 

Jack will convince them any ransom note is a trap -which it would be- and that he finally left Overwatch to join Gabe. The memory of Jack accusing Jesse of being a mole is fresh in his mind, and his heart aches harshly with the thoughts. He had loved Gabe as a father, once; in the past he may well have done anything for the man, but not anymore. But Jack didn’t see it that way. 

He was alone now, and no one was coming for him. 

****

Days past, maybe two weeks. The light in his cell never went off and they fed him at random times so he couldn’t establish a pattern. They brought in a bucket for him to use, and kept him hobbled or bound in some way at all times. He felt they were being overly cautious, as he was barely a threat to begin with, but he would have done the same. 

About three weeks in he was sedated and taken to a lab. They stripped him naked and removed his prosthetic plating before strapping him to a cold metal table, and fear curled in his gut. Overwatch must have confirmed what Jesse had told Akande; they knew it was a trap and thought he was a traitor, and now that his usefulness as a hostage was over they could experiment on him as they liked. 

They tried brainwashing, he thinks; they taped his eyes open and made him watch propaganda until his vision blurred, kept him pumped full of drugs and whispered words of hatred in his ear. 

He began to forget who he was, why he was there, why they were hurting him, but the one thought he held onto was  _ I deserve this.  _ It played on repeat again and again when they cut him open and implanted weird objects, injected strange things into him, made him run sims fighting Overwatch agents until he collapsed. 

_ I deserve this. I deserve this. I deserve this.  _

He heard his captors talking one day; the conditioning just wasn’t working, they said. They’d tried for months, and he still ran sims that allowed him to be killed before he would fire his simulated weapon. He refused allegiance to Talon even though he didn’t remember his own name. 

Kick him over to experimental, they said, and he was moved to a different lab, this one filled with people in cages. He didn’t need a cage; aside from refusing to fire a weapon, he was as docile as a well trained dog. He didn’t flinch when the long-fingered scientists cut into him with a scalpel, allowed them to eviscerate him on the table while they hooked electrodes up to his brain and made him stare at his own open chest. His heart beat placidly along, exposed to the air, and he watched them inject a dark, black, viscous liquid straight into the helpless organ. 

****

When he wakes next -did he pass out after the injection?- he is not in his body. He is standing next to it, watching the blond scientist hunch over his open chest, cutting out pieces of his liver. He thinks he is dead, at first, and then he watches his liver grow back in seconds. His heart is still beating, lungs expanding, and he knows he isn’t dead. 

_ My name is Jesse McCree  _ he thinks to himself, and he realizes he doesn’t actually have a body to move as he moves closer to the operation to get a better look. Like this, he is ephemeral. It has something to do with what they injected in him, he knows, and he also knows he doesn’t have much time. 

Bored of watching his body, and certain he will die soon, he leaves the lab he’s in. He wanders through the base, memorizing the layout, wondering how he can use this access to his advantage if he can’t relay any of this intel to anyone. 

It’s almost by accident that he falls into a computer; he moves to get out of the way of someone on instinct and lands on a computer. He  _ slides, _ down and inside and suddenly he can see everything in perfect clarity. The entire computer is at the tip of his fingers and it’s connected to other computers. 

It’s connected to the server room on the base. 

It could take seconds, or it could take hours. Either way, he finds a way to compress sixty terabytes of information about this base and several others in one small file and sends it out amongst other normal emails. He gets a small ping when it lands where it’s supposed to and anxiously waits to see if he was discovered. 

Nothing happened after several long moments that might have been days and Jesse realized he wasn’t quite perceiving time correctly. He took a few moments to consider this, and then decided it didn’t matter. Even if he wasn’t dead, he wasn’t strictly attached to his body and so he let himself flow, tugged on the strings of the wires, experiencing the internet in a whole new way as he glided along circuits and keyboards, absorbing information.

An eternity passed, and only a few moments. He followed connection after connection, gathering information. It led him to Talon base after Talon base, to corrupt politicians and extremist groups. He kept a steady stream of information going back to Overwatch, rooting out moles and money and so much information he would have never been able to find tethered to his body.

He wondered what had happened to it, one day; it hadn’t died yet, he was sure, or he wouldn’t be here anymore. He wanders back to the base he last knew it was kept, flitting out of the wires for the first time in...he isn’t sure how long.

The base is empty; he wanders around, going to the lab he knows he was kept, and the instruments are still there, but all the cages are open and the lab is dark. He must have been moved, but doesn’t know how to find his body. As soon as he thinks it, though, he feels a tug in his sternum.

He follows it, flowing strangely over the land and ocean as he’s pulled. It’s sort of like flying through the wires, but more organic. The difference between flying in a plane and free falling, he thinks. In moments (or is it days?) he finds himself standing over his body in a hospital room. His hair is much longer than he remembers, flowing over the pristine white pillows. He’s hooked up to an IV, but not much else, his chest rising and falling slowly. His cheeks are sallow, and he looks much thinner than he should. Probably not getting enough nutrients.

He looks around, takes in the crisp hospital room, recognizes it as the med bay at Gibraltar. He huffs softly, and feels something like hope filter through his heart. He reaches out to touch his body, to rejoin it, but hesitates. 

He remembers Jack’s words. He knows that it’s likely the only reason his body is here is so they can interrogate him. They’re probably still convinced he was a traitor all along, and are waiting for him to be conscious enough to collect his bounty. Like this, he is of use; he can keep doing good, and he at least knows his body will be looked after. 

He’s afraid.

They didn’t come for him. They were convinced he was working against him, and they left him to be tortured, broken down. He isn’t sure he wants to go back to that, to knowing he is distrusted and maligned constantly, to feeling out of place and unwanted. 

He looks up at the sound of footsteps, and if he was in his body, he is sure his breath would catch in his chest. Hanzo is entering the medbay, and he’s  _ gorgeous.  _ His hair is down, long over one shoulder, and he’s dressed casually in sweatpants and a t shirt, sandals clicking softly as he makes his way to the chair beside Jesse’s bed.

“Good afternoon, Jesse,” Hanzo murmurs, stroking along Jesse’s forehead and hair a moment as he settles, pulling a book into his lap as he crosses his legs. “You’re hair is getting so long, we might need to trim it soon. Ah, but it looks lovely, long. Perhaps we’ll braid it instead, hmm?”

He speaks easily, as if this routine of unanswered smalltalk is familiar, and something twists in Jesse’s chest. An emotion he is afraid to name is welling in his core, and he makes his decision as he listens to Hanzo begin to read. 

He reaches out to his body, breathing quietly on the bed, and everything goes black.

***

Hanzo was the only one who believed something had happened to Jesse when he didn’t show up to their weekly drinking day. He was the only one who wasn’t convinced by Jack that he was a Talon agent and that his kidnapping was a ruse to get them into a trap. He was the only one who believed the video of Jesse being beaten was real, and not staged.

He was the only one who was right.

Hana was the one who found him, when Winston confirmed the intel they received from an anonymous source was accurate and not a trap. They cleared the base, room by room, after successfully laying siege to it. The lab she found was full of horrendous experiments, most of the people dead or dying, and on the first metal slab was Jesse, strung up and carved open. His organs were exposed to the air, twitching as they worked, several of them completely removed, but somehow still alive.

The other people found alive were taken to a local hospital but Jesse was taken back to base, and Mercy operated for nearly six hours, replacing his liver, stomach and  _ entire digestive tract  _ while Hanzo waited anxiously. He felt like he had failed his friend; he had looked, of course, but on his own he had only chased down dead ends, ultimately returning to Overwatch to a triumphant Jack. He insisted Hanzo’s inability to find anything only proved that Jesse was a traitor.

He even had the gall to try to say them finding Jesse in the lab cut open was a deep fake. Angela had to remove two arrows from his legs. Hanzo was informally reprimanded.

They found the files on Jesse and the other people in the lab, and Hanzo read every single word. They’d started with the same techniques used to brainwash Widowmaker, apparently; the notes detailed that the conditioning worked until they asked him to pick up a gun. He would leave the weapon loose at his side, refusing to fire no matter how much pain they threatened or how well he had obeyed other tasks they’d given. Hanzo had tied Jack to a chair and read aloud the entirety of Jesse’s treatment, from start to finish, for twelve hours. 

That had been almost six months ago now, since they had found him. Jesse was in a deep coma; his brain was barely active, just enough that Mercy couldn’t declare him brain dead, and Hanzo had threatened harm to anyone who suggested they pull the plug. 

In truth, he didn’t need much; just an IV of fluids and nutrients. He breathed steadily on his own, heart pumping along, as if he were only sleeping. Hanzo visited as often as he could, reading to Jesse, hoping that the man would wake up. 

He paused in his reading as movement caught his eye; Jesse’s fingers clenched and unclenched in the sheets, and Hanzo’s heart pounded. The cowboys expressionless face twisted up, his breathing hitched, and his grey eyes flicked open. 

The book Hanzo had been reading from fell limply from his fingers, and Hanzo finds he can’t move as he watches Jesse blink over and over, face scrunched up in confusion and he looks around the med bay, eyes finally falling on Hanzo. 

Dread wells up in the archers chest as something  _ off  _ about Jesse's gaze sparks something in his memory. His eyes are distant, blank and empty as they stare into his own, and when he speaks, Hanzo wants to scream. 

"Ready to comply," Jesse says, and his voice is  _ wrong,  _ robotic and too raspy, and he remembers with a choked cry that they had clipped his vocal chords to keep his screaming down. "Functionality may be impared. Maintenance is required."

"Athena, call Angela," Hanzo manages, reaching out and grasping Jesse's hand. His gaze slides from Hanzo's face to where their hands are linked. His brows draw up, confusion written on his face, but he does not comment. He just lays there, expression mostly blank, his eyes terribly empty. 

Angela enters after a moment, and Hanzo is barely hanging on. He's trembling, trying to keep a lid on his emotions, and desperately holding out hope that there is a way to reverse this. Widowmaker had shaken her own conditioning, and by rights Jesse had never fully succumbed. 

"Jesse!" Angela exclaims as she notices that he is awake, and his terrible, empty gaze shifts to her. "You're awake! How are you feeling?"

"Functionality may be impaired. Maintenance is required," Jesse repeated in that clipped, robotic voice. Angela's face, which had bloomed in joy, fell immediately upon hearing that.

"Oh no," she murmured, and Hanzo looked at her. Tears were brimming in his eyes, and he felt as though he'd been gutted. 

"Please tell me you can fix him," he whispered.

"I'll do everything I can," she swore, and Hanzo nodded. 

It was the best she could offer. 

Angela ran tests. Jesse was perfectly compliant, and answered basic questions with ease. He knew the year, the approximate date, and even their names and call signs. But when he was asked anything about himself, he gave incredibly troubling answers.

“Do you remember your name?” Angela asked. 

“I am a soldier. I do not have a name. Do you wish to assign a call sign?” he replied in that terrible, awful monotone. 

Hanzo had to leave the room. 

****

Angela keeps Jesse in the medbay for rehabilitation, and to run tests. She and Winston and the other scientifically minded on the base are divided on how much they should tell him. They argue it so often the only Jesse ends up being told is his own name. He seems confused when they tell him he has a name, and when pressed further he admits he didn’t think he had been born. He thought he was an omnic.

He takes them at their word for everything; Hanzo pours back over the files on what was done to him, both glad and disgusted by the detailed notes that were made on his conditioning. Apparently, he had been so difficult to work with, they had to make him compliant to anyone, not just authorized personnel. It isn’t hard to convince him he is a person and not an omnic; he only blinks and nods when he is told. It takes a little longer for him to accept that Jesse McCree is his name and not his callsign. 

He is malnourished and his muscles are atrophied, but he recovers rapidly from it, more rapidly than normal. He also seems to need to eat more often than before, and in greater quantities. Hanzo has taken himself off the mission roster to watch over him, spending more time with Jesse than ever before. He watches over the man in the medbay, and accompanies him on walks throughout the base when he is well enough to do so.

It’s been about a week since he woke up, and Angela and the others still can’t decide what they want to tell Jesse about himself, if anything. Hanzo has been frustrated by the entire argument, and is of the opinion that he should just tell Jesse whatever he wants to know. Maybe telling him stories and exposing him to his old teammates will help to jog his memories. 

He and Jesse are walking along the cliffs at sunset, Jesse clutching Hanzo’s arm for support as they slowly plod along when his brow furrows and he stops. “I used to come here to smoke,” he says, slowly, his voice full of more emotion than it has been since he first woke up. He’s staring out at the ocean, frowning, and Hanzo could weep with joy.

“Yeah,” he said, voice tight, and Jesse turns his head to look at him. His eyes aren’t quite as empty. “Yeah, every evening. Sometimes I would join you.”

“You smoke them funny Mongolian cigarettes,” Jesse continued, his lips curling up in a smile. “They smell like cloves.”

Hanzo can’t help but pull Jesse into a tight hug; the man wraps his arms around him without hesitation, and his arms are too thin and he feels too slight against Hanzo but he’s  _ back  _ and he’s remembering. 

Hanzo knows they have a long and terrible road ahead, but this moment? This moment is perfect.


End file.
